


(Weep) Wretched Man

by Electric_Apple



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Pre-Serum, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sergeant Barnes, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-06-10 15:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6962170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Electric_Apple/pseuds/Electric_Apple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky kills his first man in Africa. </p><p>It’s both easier and harder than he thought it would be, back in Basic when the uniform felt good and the stripes sat a little more easily on his shoulder. Easier, because all has to do is raise his weapon. Doesn’t have to sight, just pulls the trigger. The recoil ricochets up his arms, the hazy outline thirty yards in front him him staggers, falls, and it’s over. Just like that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(Weep) Wretched Man

Bucky kills his first man in Africa. 

It’s both easier and harder than he thought it would be, back in Basic when the uniform felt good and the stripes sat a little more easily on his shoulder. Easier, because all has to do is raise his weapon. Doesn’t have to sight, just pulls the trigger. The recoil ricochets up his arms, the hazy outline thirty yards in front him him staggers, falls, and it’s over. Just like that.

Except that it’s harder than he ever thought it would be because his stomach is still churning from the motion of the landing craft and he’s soaking wet from the waist down, trousers already chaffing the inside of his thighs. There’s sand fuckin' everywhere and he can’t see further than a few feet in front of him but he knows that there’s a battery raining fire down on them from the top of the dunes because he was watching it from the water and he’s feeling it now, the puffs of air against his face as the bullets fly past him. 

He has a heartbeat to wonder at the sheer stupidity of this - Bucky Barnes, just a boy from Brooklyn who’s never been further from home than Stanton Island before he enlisted, standing on a beach in _North fuckin' Africa_ while people shoot at him and he shoots back.

Goddamn. Fuckin’ _Goddamn_. 

He looks around for his squad, finds twenty scared faces looking around for him. Leads them further up the beach, the hail of bullets churning the sand. Digs them in behind the scant shelter of the first slope of dunes so they can cover the squads attacking the battery. 

Later, he’ll be surprised to learn that the entire engagement - from the time they pushed off from the ship till the time battery falls silent - is over in less than forty minutes. That’s it. Just forty minutes to land the beach and storm the dunes and silence the battery. Forty minutes. Less time than he spends at the cinema on Friday night. Less time than Ma spends cooking a roast dinner. Less time than Becca takes to get ready for church on Sunday morning. 

He thinks there oughta be something more than this at the end of the day during which those forty minutes occurred; more than the familiar green of the Army tent above him, the familiar rough of the blanket, the becoming-familiar sound of Munroe snoring beside him. People _died_ today.

It’s a hell of thing, he thinks, lying there on the hard ground in Africa with a lit cigarette dangling forgotten from the fingers of his right hand. He’s glad Stevie’s out of it. 

* * *

Bucky learns about heat in Africa. 

He learns that his skin turns the dark brown of his mother’s Italian heritage, never quite burning the way the paler guys do but sometimes, after a long day on the back of a truck or digging latrines when they shift camp yet again, it feels tighter than he’s used to, like it doesn’t quite fit him the way it should. He learns that metal gets hot in the sun - really fuckin’ hot, almost blistering his hands the first time he grabs the side of a jimmy to pull himself up into the tray. He learns that sweat stings his eyes more than the dust in the dockyards back home ever did and that it’s harder to clean his rifle when it slicks his fingers and drips from his arms.

Three of his guys fail the dog show only two weeks in, because they focused a lot on keeping feet _dry_  in Basic but not on what happens when the sand creeps into your socks and rubs the skin clean off the back your heels as you march. He makes a point of taking his boots and socks off twice a day and shaking them out; insists his squad does too. It goes someway towards fighting the inevitable blisters but he also learns that sand - desert sand - is _really fuckin’ hot_ against bare skin, almost as hot as the jimmy and with almost the same results.

He’s never cool here.

Even on the hottest days back home, there was refuge - the afternoon sea breeze on the docks chasing away some of the humidity, the soft puff of air through his bedroom window, the electric fan in Steve’s mom’s kitchen. Here, there’s no relief. Water is few and far between, showers rare, baths unheard of. He washes his face in the lukewarm dregs of his canteen every few days. It’s too hot to sleep under canvas so they sleep outside, packs or blankets for a pillow, stripped down to their skivvies and an undershirt. It’s a hell of a thing, this heat. It saps the energy right out of him. He’s glad Steve doesn’t have to deal with it.

* * *

He loses his first man - first men - in a small rocky alcove above a mountain pass in Tunisia.

He knows the powers that be are gearing up for something big. The rumours have been all over camp for days now. You’d have to be dumber than dog shit to miss the increased bustle of activity, the ever-growing supply stores trucking in from the beach, the hurried back and forth from the command tent. They’re not told much beyond the usual rhetoric (God bless America and her fighting forces); his noncom rank ain’t worth shit to his platoon commander, six months out of Yale and resentful of the uneducated (or so he thinks) Brooklyn kid who’s already established the easy camaraderie of leadership with the enlisted men of the company. 

Bucky’s told to keep his men ready with water, rations and enough ammunition for five days. Easier said than done and he spends most of the time not at drill scrounging around to “procure” what they need - not by stealing, of course, he has a healthy respect for the childhood lessons instilled by Sister Mary Beatrix and her ever-present cane and besides, he’s can’t take the ammunition from another man’s rifle to put in his own. But he can work his natural charm and he does, making sure the men have fresh socks, their fair share of the limited ammunition, the pick of the rations, the cleanest damn rifles in the battalion. 

It’s a relief when they finally step off. The battle strategy is still a little hazy but his role in it is clear enough: take one squad of five men up to cover the pass while the tanks pass through it.  He picks his guys carefully. Munroe with the Browning. Reed to carry at the ammo. Jimmy, because the kid’s a better shot than Bucky himself (even if Bucky won’t admit it). Jones and Pilgrim, the third and fourth best shooters in the company. He wonders what six men are supposed to do with small arms in the face of heavy artillery but is told, in no uncertain terms, to leave strategy to the CO and get on with the job. 

Bucky is right, of course. They’re no use at all in this sort of combat scenario. 

They stumble into the new camp sometime the next day, exhausted and bloody. Bucky has _never_ wanted to punch anything more than he wants to punch the CO right in his fuckin’ face but he doesn’t. The dog tags he’s collected in his breast pocket are too heavy with the memory of the men who wore them to risk leaving those who remained to the whim of the useless prick.

Instead, he uses the edge of his shirt and the dregs from his canteen to wash what’s left of Jimmy's brains from his face and thanks God, for the first time ever, that Steve wasn’t the one standing by his side when shit went down. 

* * *

His faith in God dies in Kasserine Pass, along with a third of his squad and well over half his company.

Bucky survives because he’s the luckiest son of a bitch to ever pull on a uniform. He has no other explanation for it - how he came through the absolute _clusterfuck_  that was those six days when good men he knew (better men than him) did not. 

He knows that the news of the battle’s casualties will get out back home long before a letter ever will. Knows that Ma and Becca will be frantic for news, hearts dropping each time the doorbell rings or the mail comes - knows that even a few lines scribbled on the back of an envelope will be enough to set their minds at ease but he can’t bring himself to do it, not when his fingernails are still caked with blood and the muscles in his shoulders are still shaking spasmodically with the now-phantom thump of his rifle and - well, he can’t. He just can’t. 

He can write Steve, though. He _wants_  to write Steve, to get it out, to _tell_ someone who might understand. To see if Steve answers when Bucky tells him what he’s seen, what he’s _done_. To see if he still has a place in the world he can no longer imagine going home to. To see if _Steve understands_  - but of course that’s not fair because how can Steve possibly understand? How can he, when Bucky barely understands it himself? When Steve wasn’t there, would never be _here_ , would never hold a rifle in his hands or have to lead men (friends) into contact knowing damn well the odds of walking out the other side were - no, Steve couldn’t understand.

And he’s glad of that, as much as he can be glad of anything right now. Lights a cigarette, uses it to dull the ache in his gut that might be hunger but might also be - something else. Guilt? Relief. He hasn’t eaten in two days and doesn’t think he’s ever going to eat again.

He finds the nub of his pencil in his top right pocket (the only one writing implement has because that fucker Murphy - but no, he ain’t going through what’s left of Murphy’s pack to find it so he’ll have to make do) and a scrap of paper (yeah, the back of an envelope with Dotty Harris’s flowery writing on the front). He and Steve, they’ve never stood on ceremony so he opens with the first words that float across his scattered mind: _Tell Ma and Becca I’m fine. Tell them it wasn’t as bad as the papers will say it was. Tell them - tell them I’m okay, Steve. Make them believe I’m okay._

He rereads what he’s written. Wants to scratch out the last sentence but there’s not much left in his pencil and he doesn’t want to waste it. Isn’t sure he could find another piece of paper right now, anyway. And he seems to have run out of words. Those things he wanted to tell Steve a moment or two ago? He doesn’t know how anymore.

Another cigarette. A long pull of smoke.

He sketches a rough outline of the terrain at the key battle site - sharp, jerky lines. Not Steve’s more rounded (more beautiful) style. Something tickles the back of his brain. He knows where the words come from. A lifetime ago, huddled by the fire just after Christmas, reading to Steve (in bed, pneumonia, dangerously feverish, wracked with periodic convulsions that scared the shit out of Bucky and Sarah both). He doesn’t know why they come now but he doesn’t bother thinking about it too hard. Uses the last of the lead to scribble beneath the sketch. _While lions war and battle for their dens/poor harmless lambs abide in their enmity._

He stuffs the paper back into his top right pocket, along with the remains of the pencil. It’s time to come back to himself, to go be a fuckin’ soldier in the fuckin’ army. He has kids to yell at, latrines to dig, chow to find for what remains of the company. And he’s glad Steve’s not here, he is - glad that all Steve will ever know about Passerine Pass (or any other fuckin’ battle) is what he reads in the paper or sees on the news reels - but the small, selfish part of him can’t help wishing that he’d been able to see Steve once, just once, before the battle turned him into someone Steve will no longer be able to love.

 

**Author's Note:**

> * Title and quote from Shakespeare  
> ** I'm not even sure where this came from, really - except that given the heavy fighting the first wave of American forces were involved in, I can't help thinking that Bucky was a changed man even before he was strapped onto Zola's table.


End file.
